One college roommate sticks with Cruz

Ted Cruz in 2012 after winning a runoff election for the Republican nomination for the Senate from Texas. David Panton is over his left shoulder. Credit Johnny Hanson/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

Jason Horowitz reports in the New York Times,

On a break during a business trip to Washington last year, David Panton hailed a cab to take him to the Capitol. He told the driver he was going to see the Texas senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

“He’s racist,” the cabdriver replied, according to Mr. Panton.

Mr. Panton, taken aback, informed his driver that Mr. Cruz had a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the right side of his desk, that he was the only senator to attend the funeral of Nelson Mandela and that he had a “black guy” as a college roommate and best man at his wedding.

“I don’t believe that,” the cabby said, as Mr. Panton tells it.

“Well,” Mr. Panton replied, “you’re talking to him.”

...But through it all, he could depend on Mr. Panton — his former roommate, debate teammate, business partner and political booster — as a source of unconditional support, the guy who extends a hand when the whole world seems to offer a stiff-arm.

“The media has caricatured Ted as this one-dimensional, hard-core guy,” Mr. Panton, 44, said with some irritation in an interview during his business trip to Washington last fall. “Ted is principled, but he is actually a good guy and was a great friend to me.”

But midway through freshman year, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Panton, who enrolled in Princeton at age 16, moved in together. “Ted and I just hit it off,” Mr. Panton said, adding that his friend schooled him on conservative politics. “Ted was very kind to me; he took an interest in what I was doing in my life and in my background.”

They both picked subjects for their senior theses while still freshmen. Mr. Cruz wrote about the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th Amendments, Mr. Panton about a Jamaican politician. They were best known around campus, and beyond, as debate partners. When Mr. Cruz was elected president of the Clio, or conservative side, of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, the umbrella group for all of the school’s debating activities, Mr. Panton was his whip. Mr. Panton continued on to be a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and joined Mr. Cruz at Harvard Law School, where Mr. Panton, like Barack Obama before him, became president of the Harvard Law Review.


Mr. Panton and Mr. Cruz at Princeton University in 1992. Credit Daedre Levine

...“Now a major playmaker in his friend’s quest for the White House” The Jamaica Observer wrote last year, for Mr. Panton “the possibility now exists that one of Jamaica’s brightest sons could be a close friend to the most powerful human being on earth.”

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